posted at 6:00 pm on May 15, 2011 by Bruce McQuain

David Evans is a scientist. He has also worked in the heart of the AGW machine. He consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. He has six university degrees, including a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. The other day he said:

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic.

And with that he begins a demolition of the theories, premises and methods by which the AGW scare has been foisted on the public.

The politics:

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

He makes clear he understands that CO2 is indeed a “greenhouse gas”, and makes the point that if all else was equal then yes, more CO2 in the air should and would mean a warmer planet. But that’s where the current “science” goes off the tracks.It is built on an assumption that is false.

The science:

But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.

The disagreement comes about what happens next.

The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas. [emphasis mine]

But it didn’t increase the height of the moist air around the planet as subsequent studies have shown since that time. However, that theory or premise became the heart of the modeling that was done by the alarmist crowd.

The modeling:

This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.

That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.

What did they find when they tried to prove this theory?

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.

Evans is not the first to come to these conclusions. Earlier this year, in a post I highlighted, Richard Lindzen said the very same thing.

For warming since 1979, there is a further problem. The dominant role of cumulus convection in the tropics requires that temperature approximately follow what is called a moist adiabatic profile. This requires that warming in the tropical upper troposphere be 2-3 times greater than at the surface. Indeed, all models do show this, but the data doesn’t and this means that something is wrong with the data. It is well known that above about 2 km altitude, the tropical temperatures are pretty homogeneous in the horizontal so that sampling is not a problem. Below two km (roughly the height of what is referred to as the trade wind inversion), there is much more horizontal variability, and, therefore, there is a profound sampling problem. Under the circumstances, it is reasonable to conclude that the problem resides in the surface data, and that the actual trend at the surface is about 60% too large. Even the claimed trend is larger than what models would have projected but for the inclusion of an arbitrary fudge factor due to aerosol cooling. The discrepancy was reported by Lindzen (2007) and by Douglass et al (2007). Inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data.

At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

And why will it continue? Again, follow the money:

We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!

Indeed. How extraordinarily unexciting for the proletariat who will be the ones stuck with the bill if these governments ever succeed in finding a way to pass the taxes they hope to impose and extend even more government’s control over energy.

While you’re listening to the CEOs of American oil companies being grilled by Congress today, remember all of this. They’re going to try to punish an industry that is vital to our economy and national security, and much of the desire to do that is based on this false “science” that has been ginned up by government itself as an excuse to control more of our energy sector, raise untold revenues for its use and to pick winners and losers. All based on something which is, according to Evans and other scientists, now demonstrably false.

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And whose to say that warming is a bad thing anyway? Longer growing seasons mean more food for the populace, unless of course, we use that food to power our vehicles.

Regulations that have come from the lie of false science is creating fat wallets for greedy greenies like Al Gore and the like. False prophets like James Hanson (NASA) are fueling the government trough of greed, like NOAA and other government agencies. EPA.

They cannot predict the climate anymore than they can predict the end of the world. And faith can be abused.

This evidence will get NO exposure on the MSM. Nothing to see here, move right along. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This makes David Evans officially a “global warming denier” and must be denounced, discredited and shunned by the “real scientists like James Hanson.

Fortunately despite the efforts of the Obama regime and the MSM, people are figuring out what a scam that AGW is.

I will celebrate when Al Gore has his great epiphany and demands the end of flourescent bulbs, low volume toilets, green cars, and population control. I recently heard the amount of Depo-Provera in the water supply is doing more harm than all the carbon dioxide ever will.

But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome.

Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!

And in the early ’90s the climate model people asked geologists what they thought of their lovely models. Geologists applied it to past climate data, and the results were not what was in the geological record. When the model doesn’t produce anything like the real data, the model is at fault. Somehow the climate science people never bothered people who had to understand global climate in the past. Strange, that. Perhaps they didn’t like the fact that their models weren’t reflecting reality. Didn’t stop them from pushing the models, though…

In most issues of importance, it’s pretty easy to figure out who is wrong based on which side distorts language the most. For instance, when the left talk about taxing the “wealthy”, they are not in fact talking about taxing wealth, but income.

For “global warming” there’s again a clear distinction. The alarmists first started with Global Warming. When it was pointed out that parts of the planet are not warming, it was changed to “Climate Change”. What does that mean, exactly? The climate is always changing. It did before man existed and will continue to after we are all killed in the Zombie Frog Uprising of 2158. It is a meaningless phrase.

On a tangent of sorts:
Based on informal discussions at the company I work for (a global leader in a variety of weather related stuff (yes, vague on purpose)) I’ve found that:

That doesn’t appear to me to be settled. The data shows that most of the light that would be blocked by more CO2 is already blocked by the amount that is already there. When I asked that question on realclimate.org, the reply was that the absorption bands would get wider. IANAP, but what I do know is that is not how absorption bands work.

A few years ago a new satalite confirmed what the weather balloon data said: the models were all wrong. When ClimateGate came out I said to one of my lefty green colleages ” guess what? it’s now proven that global warming from carbon dioxide is not going to happen.” Her reaction was telling and priceless. She got a horified look on her face and yelled “oh no!” You see, they have so much invested in this farce that they will NEVER admit they were wrong. It is time to start saying back in their faces “The science is settled. There is no proof of man made global warming”

Skeptical Science is maintained by John Cook. He studied physics at the University of Queensland, Australia. After graduating, he majored in solar physics in his post-grad honours year. He is not a climate scientist. Consequently, the science presented on Skeptical Science is not his own but taken directly from the peer reviewed scientific literature. To those seeking to refute the science presented, one needs to address the peer reviewed papers where the science comes from (links to the full papers are provided whenever possible).

Debunking Cook’s partisan babbling is a cottage industry now, by the way.

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming

I challenge the premise that there has been any recent global warming. We only have the assertions by the people this guy admits are scam artists. They record and crunch the data and calibrate the instruments. Why believe them?

Regardless of how thoroughly the farce is exposed, those who espoused this theory can never back off and admit that they were in error. They know that once this unravels, their credibility goes down with it. If anything, they will double down.

So have the alleged “real peer reviewed climate scientists”. Western governments and the U.N. are funneling billions of dollars into research grants awarded to these “real climate scientist”. The implied proviso being that their findings support the political agenda of the U.N. and leftist governments funding these grants. It is the most basest greed and not science driving this “research” and “studies”.

Most folks seem to be well aware of Eisenhower’s warning against the growing Military-Industrial complex. If you read the 2nd half of his speech, you will find an even more strenuous urging against the Federal Research Grant and its corrupting influences.

We took the M-I warning to heart and, barring the inevitable pork-opolis, it did not grow to dominate US Industry. Would that we had taken the same care and concern for the FRG.

In the final analysis, AGW will play only a smaThll role in the energy transformation that the governing class wants. The strategy is that we must live on fixed amounts of energy from here on out, and thus this energy must be distributed and conserved efficiently.

The reasons for envisioning a fixed amount of energy involve the “dirtiness” of energy (coal, oil), safety (nuke, gas fracturing), and energy is finite.

AGW has been used as a good starting point, but now that Smart Grid is being rolled out I’m betting that they will have a flurry of other reasons (empowering customers)

Polar Bears have lost their luster (at least in the US)

The word for this is “equifinality” …. no matter where you start, you’ll wind up in the same place (centralized planning and control)

Skeptical Science is maintained by John Cook. He studied physics at the University of Queensland, Australia. After graduating, he majored in solar physics in his post-grad honours year. He is not a climate scientist. Consequently, the science presented on Skeptical Science is not his own but taken directly from the peer reviewed scientific literature. To those seeking to refute the science presented, one needs to address the peer reviewed papers where the science comes from (links to the full papers are provided whenever possible).

Debunking Cook’s partisan babbling is a cottage industry now, by the way.

In all endeavors, follow the money. If you subsidize something it grows; if you tax something it shrinks. AGW “studies” is just another business that grows because some bigger fool throws money at it. No one pays to study “climate” non-change.

If someone wants an unfavorable slant on anyone in the public eye just google them. The world is full of discontents which hardly counts as proof of anything against Evans or anyone else. That’s the same numerical shell game the Old Media plays by starting an agenda article with “Some say….” which, of course, means at least two, or at least one person more than the agenda reporter.

You’re welcome to join the debate, since the whole thing isn’t really about climate science. It’s about taxation, the vast amounts of money to be made through schemes like cap and trade, and increased government control of the daily lives of people.

There is nothing to indicate that the null hypothesis of this inter-glacial age having the same types of swings and limits on temps as prior ones is wrong. Not one single piece of evidence is available to anyone to demonstrate that the null hypothesis is wrong.

Therefore the null hypothesis stands: this interglacial age is not outside the bounds of prior ones for temps, temp swings and climate.

One major consideration that the “Carbon Dioxide” theory does not take into account is that the earth’s atmospheric “skin” is never far from what is called the triple point of water — i.e. the temperature-pressure where solid (ice), liquid (water), and water vapor coexist. Warm the earth and we get more vapor, but vapor easily turns to clouds (water-in-suspension) which reflects sunlight (cooling), and the clouds can turn to snow which can compact to ice which also reflects sunlight (cooling). This is a very mathematically exotic system, not at all easy to predict reliably. Crudely — dividing by “almost” zero is not where you want to be when you are trying to predict something. The fact that the earth’s atmosphere is so close to the triple point of water is one of the MAIN reasons that the earth’s climate has stayed inside the life friendly zone for a few billion years.

The flaw described has been known for some time. The global warmist’s response has been to rely on a paper by a scientist who built yet another computer model showing it is statistically possible that the balloon-carried thermometers somehow all missed the predicted warm bubble, and then extrapolated wind currents to show they could have been caused by the missing warm air. Of course there has been absolutely no real-world studies to confirm his hypothesis, or calls to increase temperature surveys to find the missing heat, but everyone now quotes the paper as confirmation of global warming theory.

The whole idea that the earth’s atmosphere has positive feedback mechanisms that make it thermally unstable and vulnerable to runaway warming goes against common sense and everything we know about the earth’s temperature history. It’s an extraordinary hypothesis that should require extraordinary proof, but instead is taken as gospel on the flimsiest of statistical correlations and without possibility of being falsified. As the author stated, the only reason it has become the juggernaut it has is because of the confluence of motives of scientists in search of grants, Luddite environmentalists, big-government statists, and big corporations (like Obama’s pals at GE) looking for regulatory inhibitions against emerging competitors.

AGW is the Y2K for climate scientists and related disciplines. Both were leveraged on people’s fears. In both there were possible disasterous repercussions. In the case of Y2K there was some truth which was overblown, but which did call for ligitimate action. It was played up in the press, among businesses, the computer industry and government. A lot of programmers, computer manufacturers and politicians made a lot of money, fixing a problem that was created by the long lifespan of programs and systems they weren’t predicated to be around more than a few years. AGW is all of this and more, except that it is just a theory and has no deadline.

While this guy is preaching to the choir for us we should recognize that he is making a pretty strong statement against his colleagues. He is going from the minority to the majority where Al Gore called us “flat earthers”. I hope we can see this theory struck down in the next few years. We just need a couple of big minds to look at the big picture. Climategate was just the start.

In the case of Y2K there was some truth which was overblown, but which did call for ligitimate action. It was played up in the press, among businesses, the computer industry and government. A lot of programmers, computer manufacturers and politicians made a lot of money, fixing a problem that was created by the long lifespan of programs and systems they weren’t predicated to be around more than a few years.

ReaganWasRight on May 15, 2011 at 10:12 PM

I was part of that intrepid group of programmers, and yes you’re right, we had things to fix. Software has no expiration date. As long as it works, why fix it? With programs that were transfered from machines of limited processing capacity to bigger capacities, the least expensive down-and-dirty way of upgrading was to recompile the existing code on a new platform.

Y2K was a very forseeable trap, but IT departments worldwide did their part. The reason the Y2K was a fizzle was because of countless hours spent trailing through millions of lines of code and data files, trying to recreate a programmer of thirty years ago thinking process. The result; IT came through. We did our jobs.

Climategate however, has no hard ability to judge it. The alleged “complexity” means that we must trust the word of the climatologists. So, given what we know about the AGW emails, you have to ask yourself: do you trust their word?

I’m not a scientist, but I know enough not to bet the farm on computer models that haven’t and can’t be tested for years on end. Sure enough, the facts showed that the models were wrong, but by then the environmental movement had seized so much power by waving the models around that the truth is unwelcome. I really hate government sometimes.

We live in a 3-dimensional dynamic system that fluctuates in temperature over a 24 hr period by 40-50 deg F sometimes, and any any instance on the planet is either Summer or Winter simultaneously, depending what hemisphere you live in, with transients in the vertical dimension that cover a wider temperature range than all of that (temps at 40,000 ft are often -60 deg F), and these jackwagons want us to believe that tiny variations of a naturally occurring molecule, that has been on the planet as long as there was an atmosphere, will suddenly cause a tiny permanent temperature change, that will change all life as we know it?????

I feel like the luckiest man on the planet…I have lived through literally hundreds of doomsday, and survived.
Mass starvation, mass death from disease, killer bees, ozone holes, Carbon dioxide gases, global warming, global cooling, ice ages, rising tides, last years dozens of hurricanes that were to devastate the eastern coast, over population, nuclear waste, water turning to chemical cesspools, air pollution that will kill us all…I am telling you in the past 50 years I have lived and survived more disasters than one could count.
The one disaster I haven’t outlived, is the liberal mind set of trying to destroy me, my family, my business, my country, with false claims, that one “disaster” seems to forever be over our head.

In the case of Y2K there was some truth which was overblown, but which did call for ligitimate action. It was played up in the press, among businesses, the computer industry and government. A lot of programmers, computer manufacturers and politicians made a lot of money, fixing a problem that was created by the long lifespan of programs and systems they weren’t predicated to be around more than a few years.

ReaganWasRight on May 15, 2011 at 10:12 PM
I was part of that intrepid group of programmers, and yes you’re right, we had things to fix. Software has no expiration date. As long as it works, why fix it? With programs that were transfered from machines of limited processing capacity to bigger capacities, the least expensive down-and-dirty way of upgrading was to recompile the existing code on a new platform.

Y2K was a very forseeable trap, but IT departments worldwide did their part. The reason the Y2K was a fizzle was because of countless hours spent trailing through millions of lines of code and data files, trying to recreate a programmer of thirty years ago thinking process. The result; IT came through. We did our jobs.

Climategate however, has no hard ability to judge it. The alleged “complexity” means that we must trust the word of the climatologists. So, given what we know about the AGW emails, you have to ask yourself: do you trust their word?

itsspideyman on May 16, 2011 at 12:42 AM

Umm, not exactly. Programmers from “30 years ago” were well aware of Y2K… and purposely did nothing about it.

My father was IBM’s East Fishkill ISO rep to Armonk – and showed me late 60′s, early 70′s industry articles concerning 2000 as a year and its net effect towards a “massive change”

2 key conclusions: 1) – a program doesnt just “revert through its own process” – it needs to be programmed. The gloom and doom “your bank account, bill, software will go back to 1900!!! Was false on all accounts, for there was zero programming for this to revert. 2) any and all code referencing “00″ as an end year can easily be queried and changed, if it existed at all, not a complete redump and/or purchase of a new software.

The notion tech folks swept in from 1998-2000 to save the world due to Y2K was a fabrication to begin with and a fabrication in the net, Trillion dollar business it spurred. OH – and it gave an artificial rise to the economy, deficit reduction and “growth”, including web-based companies… which ironically timed nicely witht ht e”dot com bust”… it wasnt just IB’s investing – it was the fact many of these Y2K companies were finite in their existence, while a few used it as a comapny springboard for success. 20:1 is the “fail/success” rate…